William Hinman, the director of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)Division of Corporation Finance, announced at Yahoo Finance’s All Market Summit: Crypto in San Francisco that the SEC would not be classifying bitcoin or ether as securities. It should be noted that SEC Chair Jay Clayto…

In an informal statement made at Yahoo Finance’s All Market Summit: Crypto, William Hinman, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)’s director of corporate finance, indicated that the regulatory agency has no plans to deem ether a security.

“… based on my understanding of the present state of Ether, the Ethereum network and its decentralized structure, current offers and sales of Ether are not securities transactions,” Hinman said in a speech at the summit.

Along with ether, Hinman stated that the SEC would not classify bitcoin as a security, either. Rather, both cryptocurrencies function similar to commodities like gold, silver or oil, the agency believes. Read more...

Fake ether token giveaways are clogging Twitter threads, and seemingly by the second. Targeting well-known ecosystem figures, doppelganger accounts are created, complete with matching avatars. A particularly active post can almost assuredly be counted on to receive seemingly organic calls for participation in free crypto programs hosted by the respective personality. And now they’re incorporating Google+ redirects. And it’s working. And Twitter seems to be either doing nothing about it or is just plain impotent.

In the world of cryptocurrency, trading Bitcoin and altcoinshas become incredibly popular. A lot of people rely on third-party solutions and applications for this purpose. In the case of the Taylor platform, it seems that trust was a bit misplaced. The platform has suffered a massive hack, and all of the company’s wallets have been cleaned out.

The Taylor Situation is Incredibly Worrisome

Whenever a cryptocurrency company or service provider gains any sort of popularity, it becomes a target for hackers and other criminals. This has been the case for many exchanges and trading service providers, and it seems the number of attacks will not be slowing down. In the case of the Taylor platform, things have gotten out of hand pretty quickly.Read more...

In November 2017, a pseudonymous actor exploited a vulnerability in Parity’s multi-signature Ethereum wallet library that rendered half a million ether inaccessible to their owners.

Ironically, the culprit, Devops199, was trying to patch another vulnerability that allowed hackers to steal $ 32 million from Parity’s multi-signature wallet accounts back in July of 2017. While tinkering with the popular service’s smart contracts, Devops199 blundered his way into complete ownership of the library that houses the entirety of Parity’s multi-signature wallet accounts. Alerted to this mistake, he made another by killing the code he deployed. Read more...

Since bottoming in the mid $ 300s, ETH-USD has managed to almost double in price over the course of a month. The support at the bottom came from the top of the previous reaccumulation trading range shown below:

Figure 1: ETHUSD, 12-Hour Candles, Previous Trading Range

Whether this is nothing more than a brief respite in an overall downward trending market remains to be seen. There are several very bullish factors to consider:Figure 2: ETHUSD, Daily Candles, Macro SupportRead more...

MyEtherWallet, a popular web-based wallet for storing and transmitting the cryptocurrency ether (ETH), suffered a DNS attack that rerouted unsuspecting users to a Russian scam site into which some victims fed their login credentials.

An invalid SSL connection certificate warned users before entering the phony site but some bypassed the warning, resulting in a loss of funds. MyEtherWallet confirmed the attack in a statement on April 24, 2018.

Hackers did not actually hack the MyEtherWallet platform itself but went after vulnerabilities in public-facing DNS servers instead. MyEtherWallet recommends users switch to Cloudflare DNS servers for the time being. Read more...

Former Obama administration financial regulator Gary Gensler believes cryptocurrencies such as ether and ripple appear as unregistered securities, and in current violation of the law. His comments carry considerable weight in the broader financial community. They also come after venture capitalists and lawyers invested in ether projects met secretly with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to head off such regulation. Spokespeople for both coins insist they’re not securities.

The stock of cryptocurrency investment firm, Ether Capital, has commenced trading on Toronto-based NEO Exchange. The listing comes days after the company completed its previously announced “reverse takeover transaction” that saw the company rebrand from Ethereum Capital.

Ether is the underlying token powering the Ethereum blockchain, but it serves a slightly different purpose than bitcoin does to the Bitcoin blockchain. Although ether is traded on public markets and has displayed price appreciation similar to bitcoin, they are quite different by design. Ether is not intended to be a unit of currency on a peer-to-peer payment network; rather, it acts as the “fuel” or “gas” that powers the Ethereum network. Read more...